Fluorescence microscopy is a widely used tool for determining the expression and subcellular distribution of biologically relevant molecules in a variety of systems. A key word literature search of "fluorescence microscopy" reveals over 4,000 publications in the last five years alone. Despite its widespread use, however, fluorescence microscopy is generally considered to be a low throughput protocol, since it involves the careful manipulation of slides or coverslips and a number of solution changes.
The ability to perform inexpensive high throughput sample preparation for cultured cells would allow immunofluorescence microscopy to be used for a variety of new and innovative basic scientific and industrial applications, which are currently technically impractical. These include, but are not limited to, large primary antibody screens for certain localizations or behaviors, rapid hybridoma screens, fast reagent concentration optimizations for microscopy staining protocols, high throughput clone screenings for particular molecular localization phenotypes, high throughput fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) screens, and high throughput pharmaceutical compound efficacy screens.
Some attempts have been made to increase the throughput of tissue section sample preparation for histological staining (See, for example, Koebler, et al., 1991, U.S. Pat. No. 5,023,187; Muller, et al., 1993, U.S. Pat. No. 5,273,905; Tseung, et al., 1995, U.S. Pat. No. 5,439,649; and Wootton, et al., 1993, U.S. Pat. No. 5,231,029; each of which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety). These technologies, however, are not appropriate for cultured cell sample preparation and do not have the throughput potential that would allow these technologies to be useful for the applications discussed above.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a device and method for inexpensive, high throughput preparation of biological samples for fluorescent microscopy applications.